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[jdougher]

Holy smokes, folks, do you ever break down those $1500-$3000 per course salaries into how much you get per hour for the number of hours you actually work, including preparing, teaching, grading, etc.? Is it worth it vs. just going out and getting a different kind of job? Even if you string together 4 courses at $3,000 a whack, that's just $12,000 for, what, six months of work? X2 (for another semester), that's below poverty level!

Why do people do this?

[hipgeek]

Holy smokes, folks, do you ever break down those $1500-$3000 per course salaries into how much you get per hour for the number of hours you actually work, including preparing, teaching, grading, etc.? Is it worth it vs. just going out and getting a different kind of job? Even if you string together 4 courses at $3,000 a whack, that's just $12,000 for, what, six months of work? X2 (for another semester), that's below poverty level!

Why do people do this?

More like three and a half months and when teaching courses I've taught before the prep can be quite minimal.  I'll admit that adjuncting isn't perfect but I have broken down the rate I get to an hourly wage and I find it rather generous compared to other work I've done.  I get twenty dollars an hour, and that's actually an underestimate, assuming I work two hours per class hour outside of class working on the course (which I rarely do).  Maybe this makes me a bad teacher but I just don't need to spend seven hours a week outside of class every week on making my composition class run smoothly.  The classes are capped at fifteen students so even the grading is't that great of a time drain.

[hopeandfaith]

I think 25 students is an average class size.  Students need feedback from their instructor to improve, and 25 papers/assignments per week takes a great deal of time to evaluate properly.

I can't believe a university's pay scale would consist of only 15 office hours per semester/course....that's only 36 minutes per student for the entire semester!  Ridiculous.

Personally, I desire to teach for the fulfillment and not for the salary.  I suppose people like me are inadvertently contributing to the low pay scale that some schools continue to offer.  And the down economy doesn't help matters.

[infopri]

Why do people do this?

Some people are motivated by more than just money.  Adjuncting provides a great deal of flexibility and freedom, for example, yet still affords the instructor the opportunity to teach, to interact with students and with other faculty, to use university/college resources, etc.  At some schools, adjuncts also get some benefits.  Whether it's all worth it or not depends on where your own priorities lie.

MyCity U pays adjuncts pretty well (especially in my particular school within the university), but my new CC in Somewhere Warm does not.  In fact, its adjunct pay is atrocious--about 40 percent of what MyCity pays--although I know the adjunct pay is worse elsewhere.  (The Somewhere Warm full-time pay scales are reasonably competitive, though.)  I nearly had an adjunct gig at Another Warm Place, and the pay there was 50 percent higher than MyCity's.  So there's a lot of variation out there.

[educator1]

This thread got me curious, so I calculated my hourly rate (including office hours, grading, etc.) and it turns out to be a bit less than I pay graduate students to assist in consulting projects.
However, the association with an R1 with a good reputation, the provision of an office, computers, access to faculty that can help with questions that I don't know the answer to, access to the library resources, and of course, the availability of graduate students who are talented and thankful for getting paid to get experience in their field, are invaluable. This is all above and beyond the basic fact of why I do this. I love to teach!

[anon99]

I think 25 students is an average class size.  Students need feedback from their instructor to improve, and 25 papers/assignments per week takes a great deal of time to evaluate properly.

I can't believe a university's pay scale would consist of only 15 office hours per semester/course....that's only 36 minutes per student for the entire semester!  Ridiculous.

Yes but how many students show up for office hours?  As a student I maybe went for 60 minutes TOTAL in my 4 years of undergrad.  As a facutly member, I have some students who come by before exams that may take 30 minutes, but adding up the number of student visits in a semester I might reach 3 hours and that is being generous.

Time spent marking depends on the course.  I have collegues who have 3 sets of exams and 4 or 5 long quizzes.  I personally think it is a waste of the students' time to have to study for the quizzes or and their time to mark them.  My collegue thinks they are useful, so he does them.  Afterwards he wonders why the students did so poorly and I ask ho wmuch the quiz is worth (maybe 5%) and that is the reason why.   My point is having more assignments isn't always a good thing as students will put less effort into them and often don't bother to read the comments you spent hours making to help them improve their writing.